HPC-Minded Microsoft Gears Excel for Grids
December 15, 2008
Microsoft Corp. has reengineered its Excel spreadsheet application to run on larger server grids--widely used by financial services firms to model, analyze and price exotic derivatives.
Excel, originally designed for individual desktop users, has spread throughout business enterprises, becoming a mission-critical application for new product development, trading and risk management. Firms have been running Excel in tandem with high-performance computing (HPC) for years, says James Burns, Microsoft's London-based CTO of financial services, "because some exotics are so complex that the only way to model them is in Excel. And they are running thousands of copies on grids."
Such utilization has presented problems. Microsoft has not supported the application on servers, except for Excel Services, a version that runs on SharePoint Server and is used for reporting, visualization and controlled distribution of spreadsheets rather than real-time analytics. And Excel occasionally launches dialogue boxes, which is fine when an individual desktop user is there to respond, but a problem in a grid with thousands of processes running at once.
According to Burns, one financial services customer employed a person whose sole responsibility was to monitor servers overnight, shutting down dialogue boxes to let processing continue. "Firms have written code to get around this and intercept the dialogues, but in discussions with the Excel and HPC product groups we realized this was a huge customer issue," he notes.
Rewriting Excel would have required a massive amount of work, but Microsoft was able to develop an add-in it says catches 90 percent of the problems caused by running spreadsheets on a server grid. "Customers do some weird and wonderful things in Excel" with the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) language, says Burns. "These remaining errors will be something for them to address."
The Excel Runner add-in, which has not yet been slated to launch, runs a model that allows clients to manage the lifespan of an Excel process and accurately track resource usage. The add-in is designed to work with Microsoft's HPC Server 2008, which has gained wide acceptance as a grid manager. Through VBA or Visual Basic, the HPC server can use Windows Communication Foundation to interact with all the spreadsheets running on it, says Burns.
The combination, he says, will help firms do more intraday pricing and real-time risk calculations for derivatives. "One customer has thousands of copies of Excel and their grid is growing weekly because they have to do more calculations," he notes. "They are running 24-7, and with the way the market is going, firms need to model and sell exotics quicker. Traders know how to model them in Excel, and firms in this market are not going to spend millions reengineering the business processes to run on specialized applications."
"Microsoft has a number of products that are well-suited to financial services, provided the product teams are willing to incorporate feedback from their vertical teams," says Adam Honoré, senior analyst with Boston-based Aite Group. In a recent report critical of Microsoft's partner program, Aite said the company was missing an opportunity to customize Excel for financial firms. According to the study, "Excel was the number-one area Microsoft capital markets partners thought the company was leaving money on the table in financial services."
Excel Runner, says Honoré, is a step in that direction. "Excel is a significant advantage for Microsoft in the HPC space and they would do well to continue down this path, perhaps even collaborating with their customers and partners on some of the effort."
